William Carlos Williams’s poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” takes a quaint, domestic scene and turns it into a metaphor. A metaphor of what? That is up to the reader. When teaching in New York City many years ago, a colleague used this poem as a springboard for students to write short poems centered around an object and color. She later created a bulletin board with their work. I remember one student described his mother’s eyes as “black like frying pans.” Williams’s poem is accessible to young readers and to high school students, and can be incorporated into a variety of creative writing assignments that focus on themes of dependence, setting, metaphor, contrast, and color.
“The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
